We all know content is king, but for solopreneurs and smaller brands, keeping blog posts and social feeds fresh and relevant can be a struggle. Time taken away from designing, manufacturing, and direct selling can be hard to give up.

And while the struggle is real, it’s important to keep those social marketing channels well fed and buzzing.

The effort can be made a bit easier by devising a content plan at the beginning of each week or month. Taking time to do this exercise will take the stress out of the content production process and help your creativity flow more easily.

You may be a beauty or accessory brand and creating content about anything other than product can seem like a waste of time. But keep in mind that a successful marketing plan requires more than simply cataloging your offerings.

Consumers expect ingenuity, entertainment, and social value from brands these days. They’ll quickly gloss over a continuous loop of stale product pics. As a result, important marketing channels like Instagram and Pinterest will fizzle from lack of interest.

Need more convincing that posting on your blog and social channels is essential to your brand’s well-being? Consider this:

Those all-important social media and google algorithms will stop favoring you if you don’t keep your feeds humming. As a result, your posts won’t appear on your followers’ feeds.
When you disappear from social media and withdraw from your blog and emails, you lose the social capital you’ve built up with your audience. You fail to be top-of-mind and as such you create an opening for your competitors to take over.
Posting and staying in the social mix helps you stay on top of trends as they happen. It improves creativity and strengthens your brand as a result.
You will improve your discoverability through SEO (back to those algorithms). Your blog and social feeds are key to attracting new customers.
You can get in front of new audiences that would otherwise never discover your brand by exploring as many social channels as possible. And not only will customers engage with you, but A-list press will notice you as well.
It helps to establish your point of view, expertise, voice, and social presence.

But how you say? I don’t have time!

Plan to create content that’s fresh and on-trend. And while keeping it current does means lots of content, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel for each, and every post.

CREATE A MONTHLY OR WEEKLY SCHEDULE

Write out a schedule that encompasses a blog, email, and Instagram at the very least. For a more robust campaign add video for YouTube, Twitter, a Podcast, and TikTok. Facebook is important as well, but it’s quite easy to post on Instagram and FB simultaneously.

A successful content plan focuses on promoting your brand by offering valuable information or entertaining content to consumers. It’s good to get your audience’s attention, but it’s also important to stay consistent.

HONE IN ON YOUR MOST POPULAR CONTENT AND RECREATE IT, AGAIN AND AGAIN

In your content plan you should be looking back through your blog and social posts to see what your followers and customers responded to best. You should be able to access your website’s analytics to see what seems to be resonating the most with consumers. On social feeds take note of comments and likes.

Zero in on your most popular content and devise a strategy to make it fresh for today’s followers and readers. Add new imagery and change the title. This is a practice employed by every media company in existence today. They repost and repost and repost, but generally add and move info around so that it’s not a carbon copy of past information.

If you browse most influencers feeds on Instagram or Pinterest, especially décor and design accounts, you’ll notice that these creators will often repost the same room or scene over and over and over. A staircase or a door with different lighting and props will be posted dozens of times, and their followers are consistently thrilled.

FOCUS ON ONE TOPIC AND BREAK IT INTO BITE SIZED CHUNKS

A great strategy is to have a topic of the week and create one blog post that covers the subject as fully as possible. Break out paragraphs, images, and sentences from this post and use this info across your social channels. Your blog post can easily be a podcast, and an email blast - and your imagery combined with sentence grabs (infographics and/or photos) can populate your Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, FB, and Twitter accounts. Create a series of infographics and splice in some video for YouTube, and TikTok.

It goes without saying that you should schedule and spread your posts out throughout the week so as not to bombard your accounts at once.

If you’re struggling with ideas, here are some evergreen subjects to get your juices flowing:

CONTENT IDEAS FOR BEAUTY BRANDS

Ingredients, Ingredients, Ingredients – the good the bad and the ugly. What do core ingredients in your blends do for skin and health, how they’re different from other brands. Where do your ingredients come from? Beautiful skincare or makeup results. Your favorite products. Your favorite customer’s skincare routines. Selfcare routines for the changing seasons. Favorite retailers and their towns.

CONTENT IDEAS FOR ACCESSORY BRANDS

Fashion trends and seasonal favorites. Get the look (of celebrities and favorite movie characters). Color trends, pattern mixing, and materials matter. Origins of various design choices. Inspiration for your designs. Party looks. Favorite retailer profiles. How to style a scarf in 20 different ways.

CONTENT IDEAS FOR DÉCOR BRANDS

Setting the perfect table. Creating vignettes from your designs. Design trends. Fabulous interiors. Room by room makeovers. Inspiration for your designs. Holiday decorating. Before and Afters. Home fragrance and mood matching. Housewarming gifts.

With all these subjects bear in mind that content for lifestyle brands should largely be image driven.

The key to any successful marketing campaign is to get in front of consumers again and again so they become familiar with your brand and have a feeling of trust when they hear your name. Small companies with limited resources (ie: advertising budgets) can tap into social accounts by planning in advance, and repurposing content.

HAPPY POSTING!

Fabulous Grace Sanders images via Rachel Claire

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